Keep it Simple: Video for Photographers

Lesson 21 of 40

Three Point Lighting

Keep it Simple: Video for Photographers

Lesson 21 of 40

Three Point Lighting

Lesson Info

Three Point Lighting

here we have vintage nor set it's lit photographic so we didn't have enough time to break everything down to teo set everything up and set the lights but lindsay's going to kind of go over how we lit the set and how we design everything that you can do on your own time so yeah I'm actually going to ask our male model to come take a seat behind the desk with your hands joseph joseph jeff and lindsay I'm going to turn these all office that we can build it piece by piece okay so I think one of the things for me that was most intimidating about trying to get the movie look was lighting because I felt like all right maybe naturally I could fake but like a soon as you want dramatic studio late what do you do buy a lot of lights rent it too complicated so what we found is that we're totally fine with just using your modeling lights on dh so of course ideally modeling lights for your studio stroke maybe you'd pick a if you have a choice a higher wattage modeling light to give you a little bit ...

more power on dh in my studio usually shoot wrong color jeff a lot of time sheets both and so we have actually pro photo here today we have the deal in years the reason that we have this particular model is that if you're going to be shooting with your studio strobes you want them to be ableto have variable powers of modeling lights because some lower and kits it's on or off or like okay there's a little bit of difference between low power and high power these there's actually a setting on the back to set it proportional which means you can set it proportional to the output of the strobe or free meaning you just said it whatever power you want so for us since we need to control the power it's going to be important that we can modify the modeling so on the set today I mean pro photo does have constance that they do have available if you decide to go to video completely your modifiers from strobe lighting will still attached to the constant light so if you invested one product it'll continue to work with the other products of this is going to be us using just the modern lights for today that replicate something on your own time if you have these available yeah that's a good point too so you know the co photo ones that they make are called proto pro daylight's they're constantly look very similar they are significantly more expensive than the strobes but yeah that's a great point so it's gonna function the same way that's why I love it it's really really uh comfortable and easy to use so I'm going to build this set piece by piece to fit dramatic lighting so one of the things when the elements of dramatic lighting is a lot of shadow you need to have a direction of light so for that reason I am not going to have any lights directly in front because that flattens everything out if you have a light in the front all the shadows are falling behind which means you don't see them you wanna have all your lights off to one side or the other in order to create show so the first thing I can do is create an overall light to the same so what I've selected here is this is this modifier if you take a look at it it's something called a long throw or it's hella zoom reflector it focuses a lot of light it is very contrast ing and so because how this modifier works you will have extremely crisp shadows so you take a look at the shadow beside his nose it is very very defined if I use a soft box it wouldn't have the same field and wouldn't be as dramatic uh I'm gonna walk over on this side so we've said that that's just the kind of do a general light for the scene but if you look at how film noir looks usually there's a couple hair lights or dramatic lights from the side it's almost like three point lighting that we see a lot in portraiture that gives a little separation from the background which is a great thing exactly so look back over them for me so if he's sitting there now he has nice separation on his arm and on the side of his face before he kind of blended into the background if you look he has in a brown shirt it's a brown background its shadowy so we need to add that for separation um so that one that we have back there again it's just the modeling light but we have a great on it because if we had a regular light bare bulb it would spread all over and so a lot of this area that we want to be still shadowing I would have liked flooding onto it so I believe we have a ten years twenty degree grid there I believe that one's five and that was twenty okay save twenty degree grin on that all right so you could actually shoot the scene just like that if you wanted to if you had two lights because I mean a lot of us we don't have like ten fifteen strokes it's not not the idea there so you could absolutely shoot that but what we did is we wanted like a little kick of light on his face all right make it pop out just a little bit more a little more drama so I took one more stroke don't put a five degree grid on it someone turned one on right there on his face so he pops and it really looks like purposeful movie lighting uh like I said these I can change the power I could move him back to decrease the power but the example that I give you see me teach studio lighting severe strobes if you have a treat like a bucket of water if you have a bucket of water has so much water in it and I throw from say here kinda light her face it stays pretty focused or you'll get wet just on your face but if I back out yes less water will reach you so it's like having a dimmer light but it spreads out everywhere so if you can you try to use the correct modifiers to achieve what you're trying to go for and ideally you very the power instead of the distance because if I back that light up instead of me just like a nice kiss on his face the further I back it up the more it'll spread out into the entire scene which defeats the reason that I use that light and so if I want even just more like here you can I can actually make it just on the center of his face I could move that light and even more so right here all we have is modeling lights we have three late set up you could definitely do it with two I have one last one only because I'm looking at the set now and I love you very very contrast but I'm looking into that skin if I'm shooting video there's a lot of shadows that are on that desk that I may not want to show you know where these lights coming from maybe if I'm looking at a scene photographic wise where are all these lights coming from because there's so much contrast we wanted to kick one last light back in which isn't something normally we would do because in photography we like the contrast decide but for right now we want to film every little single detail in that desk so I want to see it which is going to use one last one to light the desk itself and one of the reasons that we have a light that were he's kicking the detail back it is it's not like you're shooting rocks you can't bring up your fill light if you're an older version or bring up the the blacks of the shadows so we would rather have that detailed captured and then if we want to crush it in other words if we want to be solid black that's easy tio from the detail out is it it's like shooting in j p not to mention if you notice his uh his jacket his coat didn't have any light on it before so now has some sense of details I was going to shoot this and I wanted to shoot this specific scene I have other things that I can work with theo nly thing that you'll notice is there's an led light in here which is not color balance to the rest of dusk if you look at it it's it's blue so if we really wanted this to make sense in regards to movie set I change that to fit that's his victims taken jealous that one is indeed massive way had a smaller one so turning it up higher and backing it off more wouldn't give you this similar results exactly same same exactly yeah that'd be perfect so when just teo get your guy's ideas going here yes okay we're doing like it's film you are and what not but this might make for like a really cute engagement shoot yeah it's pretty easy tio have this have a girl in the the seductress the fem fatale kind of idea or you could do a high school senior portrait work be something for an actor or it could be a music video or whatever is you're shooting like let's say a profile for a business you don't have to like it this way you can light it the way that you would like normally your specific shots if they like your style of photography so that's what we're doing today is replicating that old vintages from marla and I want to make sure that I thanked our set designers they made a list of what I wanted let five days ago and they got all of it we actually have done shoots like this before on like a madman same shoot and so you'd be surprised I've actually gone to a lot of antique shops or consignment shops and they've let me borrow things and also one of the standards is is the price tag if you give them ten percent of the sticker value a lot of times it's rental price but if you're in a nice like rural area you can use you convinced them to lend it to you for free it's not like typewriters are flying off the shelves usually uh so I think that is a great place to start you guys have any questions on the set as of right now before anything safety concerns right because this is an old vintage set way back when those fans didn't really care about safety they just cared about power you can stick your finger in there and no longer have a finger at once it on so be very very cautious so what I'm telling you is if we if I have you moved towards that fan stay as far away safe safely as possible okay those of you that are sitting at home it looks like he has I guess whiskey or bourbon inside that glass it's actually apple juice I'm not support and drinking on the job okay and the cigarette is fake elected it's an electric cigarette so it's just the lights at the end when you puff it so um I normally wouldn't teach you guys stories for starting keeping it simple for today's shoot the reason that we're going to go with his background stories because I'm gonna be recording audio when teaching you tomorrow had interlaced audience on ly way we can really think about teaching you guys how to incorporate audio is to do a story okay um the creative life team was nice enough to actually write us a story on we kind of tweaked it to fit the specific set I spoke to you guys yesterday about the shotgun mikes so if you notice I have a shotgun mic on set the same way that we set it up before with the recorder no one needs to hold it generally on a movie set somebody would be over with a boom arm holding that that whole time because I'm generally solo or for shooting together we don't have the body able bodied person to hold that specific let's go shotgun mic overhead you have reference headphones you can hear everything that you hearing on set this is for reference audio this is not going to be my ki audio when I'm finally laying that specific audio track down those of you at home way actually haven't miked up so you can hear everything that that specific shotgun mike does here from your computers it's not very nice it sounds very we spoke about that yesterday it's very roomy in here so you're gonna hear a lot of different echoing and it's going to sound perfect but when I go to record if I want to go ahead and record him and then later we're going to have him read his script over again laugh it up laugh my came the same that the same way that lindsay and ireland mike so you get clear audio and in reference the other audio track so we can have them work together so just know that you don't have to get things right the first time in regards to reading so this will this will be is this your first time acting gets kind of ok so this is first time acting so you guys will see right from the beginning how sometimes somebody'll she's never memorize his lines today's the first day he's ever seen that piece of paper and we're still going to get something decent out of today okay so I am I had a chance during our break to look at the script sit down and make some annotations for things that I was looking for I'm breaking down to set based on what he's reading um we're gonna have you just quickly read the first two lines if you don't mind just read it out loud and then I'm going to give you guys what I'm going to progress to the specific sense so please begin there's a closet over night it happened you might wanna spend the missus fitting to spend most of my nights mind once you love justice thief phone rings it was was a two tone looking to bend my ear with the latest buzz turns out well buddy rambis got nailed execution style the cops found the body late last night don't behind brave horse tavern like a life of stall thrown away by spoiled sexual I didn't have much to go off of this time around so I started making calls your connection at the antique shop around the corner came through and told me ramus was a deep really deep with the wrong crowd had a meeting with conrad lacy two nights ago lacey was a mystery a ghost no one I mean no one could tell you anything about his most ramus must have had something he wanted he had a knack for getting a hold of those things that were hard to come by in my business premise was an asset down my brandy close this file this is a case for at the warehouse and associates there was no doubt about it this was personal uh what we did come up with that yes of course we have very intelligent writer here way went online and we looked up samples from two are uh many scripts like shorts and then just made up your own character is in a little bit she was great and also were featured in it did you notice everyone on the set that on the crew got into that somehow somewhere so we have enough time right now to break down those first couple of lines ok I'm breaking down the lines I remember it was yesterday it was cool it was a cool october night the night the type of night you want to spend with the missus so I'm thinking memory I'm thinking something out of focus into focus because he's trying to memorize something right so at that point I'm thinking pull focus so we can make sure that to record those things I'm using I'll try to keep my set today for this specific aspect on three different tools which is what I generally have on set so if you guys get a chance to see this I have my video tripod which I'll uses my tripod as well as a slider I'll have my mono pod and I'll have my shouldering I'm going to try to keep today set with those three items so we're not trying to build a whole scenario okay um I'm thinking out of focus I want to do an establishing shot which means I want to know where I am so I'm gonna take my tripod I'm gonna bring it I'm gonna move this sofa continuity purposes I'll try to remember where it was and I'm going to do a master shot in the front like literally dead center because I want to see where he is so let's move this here so what do you thinking about lunch choice for something like this I would probably try to frame it up with the twenty four to seventy just to give me some flexibility because I could say ok if I'm at twenty four no if it's too exaggerated aiken backup zoom in at seventy maybe it's a little bit more intimate it's you get different fields from eight so you configure your focal length you like and switch to different lens too so I got lucky and I have twenty four seven with this you might want to go why because it is a male and it's supposed to be more you know what I mean yeah I do and it would be easier to the wide is there an actual room yeah because right now we have very distinct edges and so just just so you can think about this if I if I'm trying to go wide and I say if I assume if I physically move in and go wide my field of view catches everything versus if I still want just want that table if I back up and zoom in I still get that field of view but not everything else around it so it would be a better choice likely so I'm actually just gonna tether there you guys notice I haven't switched anything since the last set so right off the bat the way I'm actually reporting the color balance is off completely off right so I'm gonna go ahead and switch set out and let's go white balance I'm currently in daylight let's go to correct tungsten and yes and molly lights are also langston okay so that background looks decent the uh it looks like the one on the menu comes out there ok I'm shooting now on standard okay if youse notices very very red the second I go into portrait I told you guys a generally shoot portrait and I go and press live you again it's going even beam or generally should be more red so it's even on ham it's more read so in a situation like this I wouldn't shoot that portrait style unless I had to if I knew I was color correcting and post whatever isn't okay I can do a custom white balance if I needed to for today for keeping it simple I'm only going to use what's on camera okay so I'm going to try to figure out more or less what we need so from using a wider angle I could notice it's a bunch of mix light you have the light that we have at the studio lighting us and then you have the lights at the studio lighting him so for this specific set if I look under here I'm gonna put my hand into here this specific lights completely blue it was throw everything off normally I would put a color gel on there so we make sure that it's the same white balance that he is

Class Description

Videography just got easy. Lindsay Adler and Jeff Rojas are going to show how to apply your existing rockstar photography skills to capturing video — without investing in fancy equipment or learning complicated technical jargon.

This CreativeLive course will focus on simple, easy-to-implement videography techniques. You’ll learn how the photography gear you already own can be repurposed for video. You’ll also explore the lighting basics essential to capturing motion. You’ll build concrete strategies for integrating filming and editing video into your existing photography workflow. Lindsay and Jeff will share their unique techniques for using video as a way to tell stories and for integrating your one-of-a-kind style into your video work.

Whether you’re looking to add a lucrative new dimension to your photography business or ready to capture compelling home movies, this course will demystify videography and give you the tools you need to film and edit like a pro.

a Creativelive Student

This great workshop helps me to start a new experience with video, Lindsay and Jeff are so clever with a teaching very easy to follow, now I know the basics to work with movement, I got a new vision on how to take advantage of many years of photography experience, this is a new medium but image itself is the same, I recommend this to any newbie interested on getting a solid base to start.

a Creativelive Student

I bought this class because, I recently bought my first DSLR with filming capabilities. But when I start looking at it and after watching a couple of instructionvideos on YouTube I kinda got overwhelmed. This class broke it all down into clear pieces for me. Lindsay and Jeff have nice and clear teaching style. They covered everything but didn't get to far into the nitty gritty details. They always told how important something was and if you have to do it in a certain way or that is your artistic choice. I certainly can start off with making video with a lot more confidence now. The course is packed with information. It took me much longer then 3 days to watch and take 37 pages of notes!